Ben Bettenbender knows what he wants to say in this play, but has not yet decided how he wants to say it. The story starts in a corporate hell staffed by drones interacting at kindergarten level—Lester, the dweeb, has his lunch stolen by Keith, the bully, while weasely Vick plots revenge on Molly, his ballbusting boss. Cut to Vick’s apartment (a quasi-dormitory cubicle complete with single-sized bed, cardboard-box tables, microwave oven, unframed posters on the walls, and piles of laundry on the floor) for some farcical hi-jinks involving Vick’s efforts to seduce the suddenly shy Molly so that the hapless Lester can videotape them in flagrante delicto—a scheme yielding only close-up footage of the would-be stud’s bare ass (which we all get to see, projected on a huge monitor screen). After Molly quits her job and the conspirators are expelled from school—oops, I mean fired—the locale then shifts to a small town, where a now sweet, honest, and down-to-earth Lester wins the affections of a likewise now sweet, wholesome, and down-to-earth Molly.
The author’s original idea might have been to target a wide demographic, the better to market his product. Certainly its screwball antics and populist ethic have the potential (with a bit of bowdlerizing) to make Vick’s Boy a contender on the dinner theatre/summer stock/drive-in movie circuit. Unfortunately, the various elements tend to cancel one another out: audiences looking for a romantic comedy will be put off by the savage ridicule of the first scene and the bawdy slapstick of the second, while the boy-buddy sitcom crowd will likely be disappointed by the sappy-sentimental ending.
Director Richard Shavzin and his cast draw on copious reserves of adrenaline in an attempt to camouflage the ambivalence of their material. Andrew Micheli’s Lester makes a plausible, if rocky, transition from Woody Allen-ish nerdiness to knight-in-coveralls nobility, as does Cheryl Graeff’s Molly from evil-empress to airhead to All-American Girl. Joe Dempsey plays Vick as a remorseless slimeball, and Paul Christopher Hobbs’ Keith—an amoral African-American slacker who threatens to cry “prejudice” whenever not given his own way—would be unpardonably offensive if he weren’t surrounded by similarly lowbrow caricatures. It all makes for a passable display of technical expertise, but only if we keep our attention spans short.